Donald Trump, who has a B.S. in economics and not a medical degree, announced at his daily coronavirus press conference on Saturday that people should try the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to battle the coronavirus. He added that he may take the drug himself as a preventive measure.

“What have they got to lose?” the not-doctor Trump said. “I really think they should take it.”

As state governors, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, continued to urge the President to provide them with more ventilators, Trump said that he had authorized millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine in the federal stockpile of emergency medical supplies.

“It will be so beautiful,” the weirdly pro-hydroxychloroquine and anti-ventilator president continued.

There currently exists no definitive proof that the drug, often prescribed for rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and other autoimmune diseases, will aid patients fighting Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration has not approved its use, and Trump’s medical advisor Anthony Faucipreviously downplayed the drug's potential when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin (commonly called a Z-Pak), calling its effectiveness “anecdotal evidence.”

At least one person has died from following Trump's advice and self-medicating himself with a form of the drug.

Many public health experts have been baffled by Trump’s stumping for hydroxychloroquine. “Efforts to widely distribute unproven treatments are misguided at best and dangerous at worst,” Joshua Sharfstein of Johns Hopkins University told ScienceMag.

Politico quoted a unnamed senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services, who referred to Trump’s obsession as “mindshare, time and energy being soaked up by a potential wild-goose chase,” adding that “we have no idea if this works, and the evidence suggests it doesn’t.”

It may end up being a moot point anyway: as if on cue, on Saturday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modiput a freeze on all hydroxychloroquine exports. Tough break for all the lupus patients who were using the drug before a cryptocurrency investor, Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson got word of it to Donald Trump who then decided it was a miracle cure.

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